The MNG site is very closely related to the PNG home site; in fact, it grew out of
the PNG site in August 1998. Both sites are hosted courtesy of the
ever-so-spiffy folks at SourceForge.
Mirror sites have been provided
in Texas and the Netherlands courtesy of Gerard
Juyn and Triple-T Software;
in Germany courtesy of Tobias Schwarz and AmbiWeb;
in Karlsruhe, Germany, courtesy of Sascha Schwarz and Cybermirror;
Thanks! (But please, no more! We're in good shape at this point.)

MNG Basics (And How It Came To Be)

MNG (pronounced "ming"), is short for Multiple-image Network Graphics,
as one might gather from the title of this page. Designed with the same
modular philosophy as PNG and
by many of the same people, MNG is intended to provide a home for all of
the multi-image capabilities that have no place in PNG.

Although the idea of MNG has been around almost as long as PNG has, serious
design discussions didn't begin until May 1996, and even then there was
considerable debate over whether to make MNG a dirt-simple "glue" format
around PNG or a complex multimedia format capable of integrating animations,
audio and even video. By mid-1998, MNG had settled down to something
in between; while it has fairly extensive animation and image-manipulation
capabilities, there is no serious expectation that it will ever integrate
audio or video. (Those are best handled by MPEG, particularly MPEG-4.)

The MNG specification was
promoted to "1.0 status" on 11 January 2001, in accordance with an
official vote of the MNG developers, and the final, edited version was
released on 31 January 2001.

MNG includes a number of interesting features:

object or sprite-based approach to animation, with commands to move,
copy and paste images (rather than replicate them as in GIF)

nested loops for complex animations

way better compression than GIF animations

support for difference (or "delta") images for still better compression

MNG's design and feature list is compelling enough that there were
already several applications with some level of MNG
support even before the spec was frozen in May 1999--this despite the fact
that there was no MNG reference library available for programmers to use.
(There is now; Gerard Juyn's libmng
implements almost all of the MNG spec for decoding and is what gives
Konqueror, some versions of Mozilla/Netscape, and many
other apps their MNG support.) In other words, each of the
original half-dozen applications represented a completely independent
implementation written from scratch. Way to go, folks!